General Fuller was later to write that the winter battle for Monte Cassino in 1943-4 was ‘tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless of the whole war.’
The London Irish had been moved to a forward position by the river; we wondered if we were about to become the next wave of sacrificial victims. But there we stayed, because the tanks that were supposed to accompany us were stuck. Some time during this period I went back for a few days to a casualty clearing station for treatment for a bad attack of piles. This seemed symbolic. From the CCS I wrote to my old prep-school friend –
I am in hospital, or rather I am clinging to a collapsible bed and 3 thick blankets while a tempest of wind and rain fritters about me. We are supposed to be sheltered by the tent, but that gave up trying after the first icy blast, and it is now a matter between the elements and the individual.
There is one lonely figure here who has no boots. He was carried in on a stretcher weeks, months, perhaps years ago; but they carried him in with no boots. He was better within a very few days, but he had no boots, so he could not get out of bed to go away, and no one would lend him any boots. So he stays in bed and every morning the doctor comes round and says, ‘What is the matter with you?’ And the lonely figure says, ‘I have no boots.’ And the doctor clicks his tongue and takes the l.f.’s temperature and feels his pulse, and wanders sadly away. The Man With No Boots lies in bed and dreams of enormous galoshes and waders and wooden clogs, but they will never let him out because he has No Boots.
The impertinent fools who are in authority in this place have seen fit to place me on what they call a Light Diet — an amount of food so indescribably paltry as would not satisfy one of the worms that operate in my stomach. But la! Once more is the Philistine confounded, for on either side of me are men suffering most horribly from malaria, who vomit food up as fast as they put it down, and I have, by a simple process of logic, explained to them how much more satisfactory it would be if I put their food down where it will stay and feed my worms, while they will be eased of the necessity to vomit. And thus I eat 2 men’s rations and my worms are surfeited (but my pile too for that matter). Unfortunately the men continue to vomit, but on an empty stomach, which is much worse, but I really can’t be bothered to explain any more to them; although I am afraid that one day they may vomit themselves right away, and then I will not be able to eat their food, about which I shall be very sorry.
I recovered. I rejoined the battalion who were still waiting by the banks of the Rapido river because the tanks were still stuck. So we were sent into the mountains to the north-west of the monastery to relieve a Free French battalion who in the winter had outflanked the monastery from this side and had got as far as Monte Castellone, a rocky ridge even higher (2,500 feet) than the monastery hill and halfway round its back. But there the French had had to stop because the other attacks had failed. The higher command wanted to hold on to Castellone because from there one could look down on the monastery; but the Germans were on even higher ground beyond, so they could look down on Castellone, and any movement on it or to it could only take place at night. And even then the Germans were shelling the ridge and the approaches to it in the valley with great accuracy. And after we had crossed the valley there was a four-hour climb with mules to carry the heaviest equipment up a steep and rocky track. The shells continued but went whooshing over our heads on to the headquarters area below; but on the slippery track — it seemed always to be raining — mules were likely to slip and fall into a chasm, and if injured they had to be left with just the equipment being rescued. When we reached the summit of Castellone the shelling intensified and the French were, understandably, in a hurry to get out. This was the chance for a usual English grumble about French volatility.
It was too rocky to dig trenches on top of Castellone, so just on the near slope the French had constructed shelters with stones known as sangers — about five foot by four by four foot high. Within each of these during daylight hours at least two men were entombed; any movement visible from outside brought on the shelling. Most of the shells hit the ridge just short of the top, sending up showers of stones, or went screeching over into the valley below. But once, I was convinced, one ricocheted horizontally off the roof of the sanger where my sergeant and I were huddled; bits of our roof collapsed, but there was no explosion.
Rations could only be distributed at night, so during the day my sergeant and I would face each other eating stew out of a tin and at some point — there was nothing else for it — we would use an empty tin to shit in. There were the inevitable jokes: Can you tell the difference?
My sergeant and I would stretch and flex our muscles, and sometimes offer our opinions about our present predicament and the meaning of life. From the small opening of our sanger we could see the destroyed monastery above which even now dive-bombers circled like lazy wasps, then swooped down for the sting. My sergeant and I agreed that it was a terrible crime to have bombed the monastery; but if we were in command of attacking forces and we thought that bombing was going to save the lives of our men including ourselves then, possibly, yes, we would order it. I had carried a vastly heavy book up the mountain in my pack — I think it was The Brothers Karamazov. I read its convolutions with my body contorted to catch the scarce light.
At night we had to go on night patrols, which did not seem to make sense because we could not go more than a few yards over the top of the ridge without danger of slithering into a chasm. The army had an obsession about night patrols, believing that they kept troops on their toes — which, in our cramped daytime conditions, was possibly true. So we would creep out a short distance over the ridge and find a suitable stone to sit on (I once found my ‘stone’ was a frozen corpse) and from there watch the firework display of tracer bullets and flares going on in the area of the town and the monastery. Then every four day’s we would go back down into the valley for a days rest and sleep — though the long climb down and back up the rocky path seemed to make the short break hardly worthwhile. After a month on Castellone we were relieved by a Polish regiment (with whom we professed to communicate better than with the French) and we returned to the area where we had been waiting before behind the Rapido river, where still nothing much seemed to be happening. But we were told that we could take turns to go on a few days’ leave and I chose to go to Maiori, on the southern side of the Sorrento peninsula.
I had stopped writing my diary by this time; almost my last entry was about when I had been taken prisoner at Montenero. Then I had written — ‘It seems that this chronicle of an Unsentimental Journey has had its day.’ So I remember almost nothing about my days at Maiori, except that the place was beautiful, and that it was somewhere that my father and sister and stepmother and I had visited eight years earlier. So what did I think now might be a sentimental journey? Perhaps after Montenero I should try to make some reappraisal of my relationship with my father?
In my correspondence with my father about Christianity and Nietzsche when I had been at Ranby, I had written –
I see everything as a possibility, and have not the conviction to decide what is Truth and what is Right. I do not see how one can ever have this conviction, and even if one has it, why should one presume that one’s convictions are right? My reason tells me what theories are the most possible, the most likely, the most desirable; but it needs more than Reason to put any theory across; it needs a great Faith. And my Reason tells me that it is dangerous to trust in Faith, for how does one know that one’s Faith is Right? And so I am stuck; and am likely to remain so, I feel, until I am old and wise enough to have Faith in my Reason.